Page 48 of With a Little Luck

Pru grins like this is exactly the question she wanted me to ask. “Did you kiss her?”

I blanch. “God, Pru.”

“What? That’sthequestion! Give mesomething.”

“That’s … no. I’m not going to talk about this.” I’m blushing again, but my perennially red face hardly fazes Pru anymore.

She sighs, then shoots a knowing look at Ari. “He didn’t kiss her.”

I half expect Ari to jump in, to make some teasing comment. To nudge or pry or … something. It isn’t like my crush on Maya hasn’t been well-documented and discussed and dissected over the years, between both of them.

But Ari doesn’t say anything. In fact, she seems engrossed in her playing again, her shoulders tense.

“But the date must have been good,” Pru continues, “because she asked Jude to eat with her at lunch today.”

Ari looks up, her gaze curious. “What was it like meeting Sadashiv?”

I could kiss her for changing the subject. “He was nice. You know, for a billionaire.”121

“Probably not a billionaire,” says Pru. “Record labels take a lot of upfront money from the artists.”

“I’m sure he’s not hurting too bad,” I say. “And—oh! Ari, I mentioned you to him.”

Her eyes go wide. “Me?”

“I told him I had a friend who’s a really talented songwriter. I gave him your name, and he wished you luck on the competition.”

“Wow.” She stops playing. “Sadashiv has heard of me. That’s … weird.”

“Yeah, meeting him was weird. I thought Maya might faint at one point, like those girls at Beatles concerts back in the sixties.”

“Is he as dreamy in real life as he is in the magazines?” This comment comes from Quint. He’s set up his phone on a tripod and is making minuscule adjustments to its positioning.

I consider. “I mean … yeah. He pretty much looks like he’s been photoshopped into reality. Again, he seemed nice, though. Like, he knows he’s famous and could probably get away with being a jerk, but he’s made the conscious decision to be decent instead.”

“Hey, Ari?” says Quint. “Could you sit on the stool so I can check the lighting?”

Ari takes her place as requested, but she looks supremely uncomfortable as Pru and Quint both study her through the phone screen.

“We could use more lighting on this side, to counter the light coming in from the windows,” says Quint.

It’s still strange to hear Quint using his professional voice. For years, I thought of him as a toned-down version of Ezra. A class clown, a goofball. The guy everyone loves but doesn’t take too seriously. He changes when he’s behind a camera, though. He’s more confident, more focused, discussing things like shadow and depth.

Pru disappears into the office and returns with yet another desk lamp. She sets it up next to Ari, and she and Quint go back and forth for a few minutes, moving the lamp around to different surfaces, trying it with and without the lampshade, while Ari sits in the center of it all repeatedly122telling them that it doesn’t have to be perfect, and repeatedly being ignored, because not being perfect isn’t a thing that Pru believes in.

“Are you doing your new song?” I ask, in part to distract Ari.

She looks at me and takes in a nervous breath. “Yeah. I think so. I mean, I’ll play it, and you guys can tell me if it’s awful, and then we can do one of my old ones, I guess. But, yeah. I really like this song? I think it’s … I think I’m happy with it.”

I smile. “I’m sure it’s great. But if it’s not, Pru will tell you.”

“You won’t?”

I scoff, and point my thumbs back at my chest. “Biggest fan, remember? You can do no wrong in my eyes.”

Ari beams and looks away.

Finally Quint declares that the lighting is perfect—so long as we can record the video in the next forty minutes before the sun sets and we lose the daylight coming in through the windows.

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